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shift between phases in a four-stage progression which Jean Baudrillard
postulates in an essay on the postmodern loss of reality, "The Precession
of Simulacra." The first of these phases is in a sense pre-modern, for here
the image (which could include a narrative or any other form of repre–
sentation) is assumed to reflect a basic reality; it is a
good
appearance, as in
traditional, realist conceptions in psychoanalysis. In the second phase, the
image takes on evil qualities, for now it is assumed to mask and pervert a
basic reality with which we cannot have contact. This corresponds to
Spence's sense that the smoothness and clarity of narrative necessarily
misleads us as to the fundamental and nearly ineffable complexity of the
real unconscious or the real past. In the third phase, the image (or narra–
tive) only
plays
at being an appearance while actually masking the com–
plete absence of a basic reality. This seems to capture Geha's sense of the
usual functioning of psychoanalytic interpretations or narratives, which
fool us into thinking there is a basic, bedrock reality when in fact there is
none . The fourth and final phase, the stage of the simulacrum (the image
without an original) is the one Geha would like to foster, for here the im–
age or fiction leaves the order of appearances altogether. Interpretations
become transparently fictional, laying no claim to truth since it is univer–
sally recognized that there will be only fictions wherever we look.
There is something disturbing about the homogenization of existence
implied in this final phase, when all difference between reality and illu–
sion, truth and error, memory and imagination is dissolved. In a famous
remark, Hegel decried Schelling's notion of the Absolute by saying it
reminded him of a night in which all cows are black. Beneath claims to
openness and pluralism, to creativity, diversity, and play, postmodernism
may conceal something similar: a veiled absolutism that could deprive
psychotherapy of its critical edge and life itself of its density, its ontological
weight. For how can a person be encouraged to acknowledge truly
unpleasant truths, especially those sordid, unflattering facts which may
lack the compensation of a tragic dimension, if one assumes that there is
no distinction between truth and mere fiction, only stories about stories
about stories? And what is to prevent psychotherapy from turning into an
elaborate workshop for rationalization, a place for spinning self-justifica–
tory fantasies and fostering all the subtle complacencies of narcissistic enti–
tlement and self-satisfaction?
Beyond this , there is the thinning or hollowing-out of existence that
aestheticism, relativism, and fictionalism can effect, and which may
contribute to the "waning of affect" and the loss of a sense of real
historical time (on both the private and the public level) that accompany
the era of the simulacrum. After all, toward mere images one cannot feel
real affects but only "intensities," cold and deracinated affect states such as
